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Russian
The Russian Language (also known as Earth Russian) is a Slavic tongue that has originated in the Russian Federation on Earth. It is widely spoken all over Eastern Europe in multiple countries such as Belarus, Ukraine, Kazhakstan and Kyrgyzstan. Unofficially, many other countries has Russian as one of the most widely spoken language. In addition to citizens on Earth, Earth Russian is the third most spoken language in Human space, following Mandarin Chinese and English. The Russian language is notable for its differentiation between hard and soft sounds when being spoken. These sounds are used on virtually every character of the Russian language, so that while one sentence can be read in a certain way using hard sounds, an identically written sentence written in soft sounds can be interpreted differently. This is useful for differentiating between homophones. Standard Russian is usually written in Cyrillic, but different offshoot dialects may use different writing systems. Russac, a language with Russian pronunciation yet uses Latin lettering, is an example. Description & History The Russian language started out as a member of the Indo-European language family that was present as far back as 7500 BCE. While Indo-European was widely spoken then, an offshoot of this language became known as Proto-Slavic, which was one of the earliest identifiable predecessors of the Russian language that we see today. Proto-Slavic was spoken as early as the 5th Century CE. It is also the first usage of things like the hacek accent. This language was thought to have been a ''lingua franca ''among barbarians of the time. Proto-Slavic eventually became Common Slavic from 600 to 1000 CE, where pronunciations remained the same, but different makeup of words occured. The first instance of the early ancestors of Modern Russian occured during the 14th Century during the Russian Kievanperiod. The language at the time did take loanwords and calques from other languages such as Norse and Germanic languages, but the language itself remained firmly Slavic. From the 15th to 17th Centuries CE, the first modernized forms of Russian appeared as an attempt at standardization with some vocabulary borrowing from Poland. The 18th Century was the time when the Russian language had truly modernized under Peter the Great, who organized a spelling reform, creating the language that is still used to this day, though minor changes did occur. Under Soviet Rule in the 20th Century, another spelling reform took place in 1918, modifying slightly the way words looked, but the pronunciation was identical to its prior version. The differences here during the Soviet era was more of an exclusion of certain words that did not conform to the Party's values. Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of the Internet, Russian tended to slow down in terms of linguistic development. In the 22nd Century, the choice to make Russian a Static Language was declared in order to facilitate communications with interstellar colonies was decided. Russian, like other languages, became a very slowly changing one, keeping the spelling and the pronunciation the same. Offshoot languages formed, but Standard Russian has been very simiar to its 20th Century ancestor. Fast forwarding 1200 years, interstellar distances requires the language to remain similar if not identical in order to have communication between two parties from different worlds, while the world itself can have its own official language. As Russian is such a widely spoken language, hundreds of dialects and offshoots have sparked from the official language, and these dialects can be as similar as choosing to omit or add a few words to being so different that two people from two different worlds may not understand the other despite the fact that they both speak Russian. As with English, the farther away from Earth one is, the stranger and more obscure the dialects get. On the edge of Human space, Russian may take loanwords and cues from alien languages that use pronouncable sounds. Some aliens are capable of speaking Russian since they may have a similar enough voicebox to pronounce the words, but many non-Humans find Russian extremely hard to learn. Earth Russian is classified as a 'tough target language' meaning that it is a tough language for non-Russian speakers to learn. The Russian Alphabet contains 33 letters in it, which isn't so much a challenge to learn as it is to learn how to use them properly. To achieve moderate fluency, experts estimate that it takes 748 hours of linguistic study. A person who can speak Russian considers it a mark of pride to learn a difficult language correctly. Ironically, the Sangheili find it much easier to learn Russian than English thanks to similar sounding structures. On Mobius, Russian is used since it was one of the languages that was spoken by the Lost Million. However, in Yurashia on Mobius, a tribe of natives consider Standard Russian to be a language of the Ancients, the semi-diety view of the ancient Mobian Humans who went extinct 12,000 years ago. Upon meeting Humans for the first time, one of the Natives asked them if they spoke 'Ancient'. Variants of Russian *Earth Russian *Mobian Russian (Identical to ER), includes 'Ancient' *Runglish (colloquial mixture of Russian and English. Commonly used on spacecraft where crewmembers speak both the languages well) *Russac (ER pronunciation, EE spelling) *Trasianka (Russified Belarusian) *Quelia (Mixture of German and Russian) Appearances *Journal of Sally Acorn *The Sky Men (First Appearance) Category:Language